Obama Brain Mapping Project Tests Big Data Limits

President Obama's just announced Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) project might require handling yottabytes of data.

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President Obama on Tuesday announced a brain-mapping initiative that could help scientists unlock the secrets to Alzheimer's and Parkinson's Disease, strokes and even human cognition, but it won't do so without the help of significant computing power.

The Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative, announced Tuesday morning in a presidential speech at the White House after a fleeting mention in President Obama's February State of the Union Address, will require heavy use of cutting-edge and yet-to-be-invented data processing and imaging technologies if it is to have anywhere near the same success as the Human Genome Project has had for genetics.

"We can identify galaxies light years away, we can study particles smaller than an atom, but we still haven't unlocked the mystery of the three pounds of matter that lies between our ears," Obama said Tuesday. Studying and mapping the human brain, Obama said, will not only help scientists improve their understanding of human thought, learning, and memory, but could also help cure disease.

The new research initiative will include the National Institutes of Health, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the National Science Foundation, outside academics, and private companies and foundations such as the Allen Institute and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. The White House hopes to spend more than $100 million the first year of the project, with more money coming from private-sector partners.

Among other work, those agencies and organizations will be pushing the envelope on data collection and analysis technologies. "Significant breakthroughs will require a new generation of tools to enable researchers to record signals from brain cells in much greater numbers and at even faster speeds," the White House said in a press release. "This cannot currently be achieved, but great promise for developing such technologies lies at the intersections of nanoscience, imaging, engineering, informatics and other rapidly emerging fields."

On a conference call with reporters after the President's announcement, National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins said that the brain-mapping initiative might eventually require the handling of yottabytes of data. A yottabyte is equal to a billion petabytes.

Even collecting and processing the quantities of data that brain mapping might require could stretch the limits of modern information science, Collins admitted. "There have been some conversations about whether the amount of data, if you are going to collect data from tens of thousands of neurons in real time, can you process and store it," he said. "This is generally in the direction of the capability where things are headed."

Among the specific projects being funded under BRAIN will be DARPA's Detection and Computational Analysis of Psychological Signals effort, which will require analyses of very large data sets. DARPA also will "develop a new set of tools to capture and process dynamic neural and synaptic activities," according to the White House press release.

Not only will BRAIN require new computer technologies merely to perform the necessary research, but the results of the research could also be used to develop new information technologies. President Obama provided the example of developing computers that can better respond to human thought. Collins said that the research could teach computer scientists new types of information processing architectures that could provide design principles for computers of the future.

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I agree that when terabytes were mentioned it seemed like a great deal of data, now we have terabytes in regular home computers and even that is not enough for many people. Technology truly is amazing in the amount of progress that can be achieved and the ever expanding limits. With this talk about yottabytes of data being collected, we may find that even these seemingly insurmountable units of data wonG«÷t be enough for a project of this magnitude and importance.

While an enhanced budget for brain research can only be beneficial, it is probably important to think hard about goals for success from this funding, and methods for achieving this success. As to goals, we must remember that we are confronting a structure with 100 billion neurons and at least that many glial cells modifying neural functioning, not to mention the emergent features of neural activity that are a function of interactions between these physiological entities. Yottabites may even fall short of describing the exponential magnitudes of potential complexity.

This almost inestimable level of complexity probably means that the initial budget for "mapping the bran" might be best for doing just that -- inventorying and spatially locating the cells in the brain, and laying the ground for recognizing the physical, physiological manifestation of various diseases (Alzheimers; Dementia, Parkinsons etc,) When it comes to understanding brain function or "consciousness,", the full complexity of potential interactivity is in play, and my guess is that even the European (1 Billion Euro) budget for this task is only a starting point.

As regards methods for achieving success, I have heard commentary to the effect that centralizing direction and control of the project within a single committee works contrary to the norms of creative science -- where individual investigators follow personal paths of investigation and discovery. We must be watchful that this somewhat divergent approach to guiding the research efforts does not indeed become a constraint on the very creativity that is needed to ultimately reach the project goals

While this is the first time that I've heard anyone use the word yottabyte in a real-world context, I do not think by any means that the NIH Director was exaggerating when he used the term, perhaps because I know that there are other projects in the works that will be collecting data at high enough rates that may require yottabyte data stores. For example, those building the Square Kilometer Array, a radio telescope under construction in Australia, have estimated that the telescope could eventually "many petabits" of data per second, exceeding the total current Internet-wide traffic rate by a factor of 100.

The implications for mental health and the potential for new discoveries and, in the case of mental illness, possible cures, makes this an initiative worth pursuing. That said, I find the reference to yottabytes of data fascinating. Does anyone remember Microsoft's 'Scalability Day' in New York City circa 1997? At the time, a terabyte (or trillion bytes) was considered a lot of data. Now, we're talking a trillion times that. Amazing.

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